The girl who fell to earth

She seemed almost flawless, an otherworldly embodiment of physical perfection. But now, like thousands of ordinary women every year, Kylie Minogue has been diagnosed with breast cancer. Libby Brooks examines why Kylie's illness matters to us

Kylie Monogue has cancelled an Australian tour and a headline performance at Glastonbury festival after being diagnosed with cancer. Photograph: Matt Dunham/Reuters

I would never have described myself as a fan. Which made it even more surprising, that whump in the stomach when I heard on the morning headlines that Kylie Minogue had postponed the Australian leg of her world tour after being diagnosed with breast cancer. Sandwiched on Radio 4 between a discussion on the role of Mary, mother of Jesus, in the Anglican and Catholic faiths and an interview with the home secretary Charles Clarke, it sounded like news from a parallel planet, as though someone had inadvertently mixed up a page of Heat magazine with the Today programme's running order. But it was true, and I felt sad. As did Audrey and Sophie and Nicky and the other friends of mine who had heard the news too and texted before I left my flat for work.

Of course there's something enormously disingenuous about feeling terribly distressed when an attractive 37-year-old celebrity has breast cancer. In common with most people reading this piece, I know a number of women who have suffered from this disease. One in nine women will be diagnosed with breast cancer during their lifetime. Some, including my own mother, survive it. Others do not. Minogue's cancer appears to have been caught at an early stage - she would have been checked regularly while touring for insurance purposes - and survival rates have never been higher.

So there are no obituaries to be written today, other than for the myth that mere celebrity itself inoculates against life's quotidian dramas. Minogue's celebrated bottom may be just as pert as it was yesterday, but she is no longer an object of envy. It seems an anathema that a global brand such as Minogue might lose all her hair during a course of chemotherapy. But though she has rendered her body perfect for public consumption, that same body has not granted her immunity.

It may sound strange, but the diagnosis is also a jolting reminder that Minogue is as much blood and bone as the rest of us. She never seemed to have so mundane a component as cells. Even in the era of the I Should be so Lucky bubble perm, she was dismissed as manufactured thanks to her association with Messrs Stock, Aitken and Waterman. And as her different incarnations multiplied - Club Minogue, Sex-kitten Minogue, Indie Minogue, Avant garde Minogue - so her image became more and more highly confected until, even in the flesh, she looked airbrushed. But now the plastic has deferred to the corporeal.

For all the visual stimuli her perfect proportions have offered, there is something curiously sexless about Minogue. She is sexualised, rather than erotic. Even those notorious gold hotpants had a cabaret feel about them, a cheeky wink rather than a full-frontal come-on. This may explain why, in the current era of Global Minogue, the whole world has taken to her. Everyone loves Minogue, from the lad mag readers to the pre-teen shriekers to the crowd at GAY.

And for those of us who grew up with Minogue, there's a further appeal. It's a shared knowledge that somewhere beneath the glitter and the gloss and the smooth, smooth hair here's Charlene, her Neighbours character, in a frothy wedding dress, stepping out of Erinsborough church with Jason Donovan on her arm. As someone who spent a succession of school discos attempting the Locomotion, I nurse a particular fondness for this woman who began her rocketing trajectory at a point when celebrity had not yet begun to eat its own tail. I would imagine that if Abi Titmuss was diagnosed with gallstones tomorrow she would gladly have the surgery live on air and then auction the scalpel to the highest bidder. Minogue, in contrast, has retained a certain freshness, a lack of cynicism and an accessibility.

Perhaps this is a consequence of that ageless, almost ethereal quality in Minogue's persona - she was well cast as the absinthe fairy in the musical Moulin Rouge. This never-quite-grown quality also seemed evident in her relationships - often brief and blazing, never quite reaching the stage of steady longevity (though her current romance with the French actor Olivier Martinez may be heading towards it). It is notable that she is still singing about love at first sight.

And here is the rub. Despite her wealth, her financial wit, her international status, over the past five years especially, the public discourse on Minogue has increasingly surrounded her romantic disappointments. Each interviewer puts the same questions, and she bats back an eloquent testament to her heartfelt desire to settle down, have children, and dust shelves. The notion of the professionally stellar but romantically defunct woman is an appealing template for habitual hounders of Modern Misses. Women are expected to crave husbands and babies. And when they do not - or are seen not to - they are punished for it. There's still a sense that women get away with their public successes, and only for so long. But how are they to be punished?

After turning 30 myself last summer, as a childless woman who is lucky enough to love her job, I'm well aware of what the statistical jeremiads have in store for the likes of me. I'm less likely to get married than to fracture my femur in three places while on a drunken bender, and likely to find my ovaries shrivelled to the size of raisins by the time I realise that child-rearing is a woman's ultimate fulfilment, and so on.

But there is one piece of information which it is difficult to sweep aside along with all that insidious, anti-women cant. I know that early childbearing and prolonged breastfeeding lowers the risk of breast cancer. I know that, although 80% of breast cancers are diagnosed in women over 50, those diagnosed in women under 40 tend to be more aggressive. It follows, then, that women who pursue their careers into their 30s, enjoying economic independence and professional fulfilment while controlling their fertility, are more at risk.

All this is a short hop from the Victorian belief that to be female was to be essentially physically vulnerable. But it seems like the worst kind of practical joke that a woman of any age should be punished with cancer, and the most frequently occurring of gender-specific cancers, simply because she has breasts. And even worse that, for younger women, cancer should puncture the bubble of possibility in the crudest of ways.

Feminism has often been described as a movement against nature, and here is the backlash at its most basic. I hope that no one will suggest that Minogue's cancer is a punishment for making her own choices but I suspect that it will be implied everywhere. (Equally, I hope that her experience will not be elevated as somehow more tragic or more significant than all the other women who were diagnosed this week.)

Naturally, choice is a vexatious element in this context. It would be miserable if Minogue's illness were taken as further evidence of why careers don't make women happy (or healthy), and why public and private lives are impossible to juggle. Even the cheerleaders of progress and independence seem confounded by the weary ping-pong over how much satisfaction a woman deserves to be able to fit into her life. Life is not all about choices - when to work, when to fall in love, when to procreate. Much of our time is spent on the things that you don't - or can't - choose, like a diagnosis of breast cancer. And it is how we cope with those events can be the hardest, and most meaningful, choices of all.